for people who care about the West

Salvaging the atmosphere

The Forest Service joins the carbon offsets game

The tornado that touched down near Bear,
Idaho, in June of 2006 left a swath of the Payette National Forest
looking like a giant's game of pick-up sticks. The jumble of broken
ponderosa pine branches, fallen Douglas fir trunks and upturned
roots stretches for 12 miles, reaches half a mile in width and has
an estimated commercial value of $9 million. It is no surprise the
U.S. Forest Service sees the blowdown as an opportunity for salvage
logging. But the agency also perceives another, less obvious
benefit - a chance to fight global warming.

On July 25,
Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell announced the launch of the
Carbon Capital Fund, which will sell carbon offsets to fund tree
planting on national forests. "We know we can sequester more carbon
through the right kind of reforestation projects in the right
places," Kimbell said. The idea sounds logical enough. In fact, the
theory that forests can suck up excess carbon and cool the planet
helps drive a market that doubled its revenues last year to $110
million. But the Forest Service's entry into the carbon offsets
game comes as doubts about tree planting mount. Scientists are
skeptical about its benefits, and the honesty of the unregulated
market has been questioned in congressional hearings. Worst of all,
critics feel, is the tacit permission offsets give buyers to
continue their carbon-emitting lifestyles.

Visit the Web
site of the National Forest Foundation, the Forest Service's
nonprofit arm, and its Carbon Footprint Calculator can tell you how
many metric tons of CO2 emissions you are responsible for. If the
result leaves you feeling guilty, don't worry. For just $6, the
fund lets you offset 1 ton of carbon by supporting tree-planting
projects on the national forests. The transaction is based on the
theory that forests act as "carbon sinks," soaking up the
greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.

But in temperate
forests, the concept has not held up well to scientific analysis.
Forests do take carbon out of the atmosphere temporarily, but they
don't remove it from the active carbon pool, because their carbon
is released when they rot or burn. Cambridge botanist Oliver
Rackham, author of a history of Britain's forests, has said that
telling people to plant trees to stop global warming is like
telling them to drink more water to keep down rising sea levels.

A 2006 Livermore Labs study found benefits to tree
planting in the tropics, but showed that forests in temperate zones
have a net warming effect. This is because their
dark canopies absorb more solar heat than the grasslands and
seasonal snow cover they displace, and the effect more than cancels
out any benefits from carbon sequestration. In fact, when the
Livermore scientists instructed their computer models to remove
every tree in the world, the result was a slight cooling.

The University of Montana's Steve Running, a member of the United
Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, thinks boosters
are overstating the benefits of tree planting. "I'm all for
planting trees," he says, "but what I'm getting progressively
concerned about is that people think planting some trees will be
good enough." He believes the Forest Service overestimates
sequestration rates by understating factors like the release of
carbon from the forest floor. And with warming temperatures causing
more forest fires and faster decomposition, he doubts the forests'
capacity to lock up that carbon in the long-term. "If somebody
tried to sell a block of forest for a hundred years of CO2 uptake,
I wouldn't find that defensible," he says.

The scientific
community's concerns are spreading to Congress. In a July 18
hearing, Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., the chairman of the House
Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming,
expressed his concerns that no standards existed to judge offset
sellers' claims. And when the Forest Service launched its own
offset program the following week, Markey and Sen. John Kerry,
D-Mass., questioned the program in a letter to Kimbell.

The Idaho blowdown and the Kraft Springs Fire on the Custer
National Forest will be the first two areas replanted by the Carbon
Capital Fund. Both will follow salvage-logging operations, creating
the appearance that the dubious practice of selling forest-based
carbon offsets is being used to support yet another questionable
program. Since 1995, the Forest Service has promoted salvage
logging as a way to rescue marketable timber from rot while
rejuvenating forests. But environmentalists have called it a
smokescreen to hide destructive giveaways on public land. Indeed, a
2006 Government Accountability Office report found that salvage
logging after Oregon's Biscuit Fire lost money. And a study by
Oregon State graduate student Dan Donato indicated it slows
regrowth and increases the risk of future fires.

National
Forest Foundation director Bill Possiel defends the program's link
to salvage logging, pointing out that extremely hot fires like
Kraft Springs can leave forests so scorched that without replanting
they wouldn't grow back for decades. He adds that controls are in
place to ensure the fund's money is not merely used to supplement
shrinking Forest Service budgets, or to enhance the economics of
salvage logging. But Pacific Forest Trust director Laurie Wayburn,
an advocate of verifiable standards for forest-based carbon
reduction, says the controls are inadequate. She adds that the
whole idea of selling carbon offsets on the national forests is
questionable, because the forests already belong to the taxpayers.
"If this (offsets) is a commodity produced on public land," she
says, "who owns that?"

For an agency with increasingly
stretched budgets, however, selling that commodity makes a
difference. By tapping into the carbon zeitgeist, the program has
already raised $250,000. And with the agency's million-acre
reforestation backlog, there's no shortage of places for consumers
to relieve their carbon guilt.

The author writes
from Missoula, Montana, and is currently working on a book called
The Footprint: A Family Converts to the Post-Oil
Economy.